Last week local shrimpers held a news conference to take OG16 SC134

OG16 SC134Last week local shrimpers held a news conference to take some credit for the resurgence of the rare Kemp's ridley turtle, saying that their compliance with laws requiring that turtle-excluder devices be on shrimp nets protect adult sea turtles.A. requiring that turtle-excluder devices be on shrimp nets protectB. requiring turtle-excluder devices on shrimp nets is protectingC. that require turtle-excluder devices on shrimp nets protectD. to require turtle-excluder devices on shrimp nets are protectingE. to require turtle-excluder devices on shrimp nets is protectingPlease explain your answers. Thanks.

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3 Answers

Chiranjeev Singh

Solution

Sentence Analysis

The sentence says that local shrimpers held a news conference last week. They did so to take credit for the revival of some turtle species. In the news conference, they said something. What did they say?

Let?s focus on the part after "saying that" i.e.

their compliance with laws requiring that turtle-excluder devices be on shrimp nets protect adult sea turtles.

Here, "requiring" is a verb-ing modifier modifying the previous noun "laws". So, "requiring that turtle-excluder devices be on shrimp nets" is a modifier modifying laws. The sentence is, therefore, essentially:

their compliance with laws protect adult sea turtles.

We can see that we have a SV agreement error here: subject "compliance" is singular, and verb "protect" is plural.

There is no other error in the original sentence. The verb-ing modifier "requiring that turtle-excluder devices be on shrimp nets" is correct; it follows subjunctive verb format after requiring. The usage is correct.

GMAT Club Forum

Concept tested : SV agreement, Meaning. Difficulty level : High Illustration : This question tests a very important aspect of meaning. First, we know that the main verb in the underlined portion "protect" is wrong as the main subject "compliance is singular. (Note that protect is not being used as a command subjunctive in A. "be" is used as the command subjunctive). According to this logic, A and C are wrong. Now among B, D and E, "to require" indicates purpose of the law which is not the intended meaning (please refer to the tip below). So, D and E are incorrect. B is the correct answer.

Tip: "Laws to require" indicates purpose of the law, but "laws requiring indicates contents of the law. While this might sound very obvious to natives, but non natives might have to struggle to get this clearly. Consider the following examples. 1.Arms act is passed to discourage random public shootings. Correct 2.Arms act is passed to levy heavy fines on people who carry unlicensed firearm. Wrong. 2 is wrong because the arms act is not issued to levy fines. It is issued to prevent something by levying fines. So the correct option is B.

GMAT Club Forum

The best way to solve is look for subject-verb agreement. complaince should have singular verb thus we have only b and e left. E makes no sense as the use of infinitive is wrong. Thus B must be the answer